Dolimandro’s ‘Turkish Knife’: Geopolitics and Narrative Style in Mary Wroth’s Urania

Abstract

Midway through Part II of Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the narrator makes a strange intervention. The character Polarchos meets a young man named Lusio and makes him his squire. When Lusio is wrongfully imprisoned, Polarchos defends Lusio to Amphilanthus, the Holy Roman Emperor. But Wroth’s narrator qualifies Polarchos’ knowledge of Lusio: ‘Polarchos had newly told the whole story (as much, I meane, as hee knew of itt)’.¹ With this parenthetical intervention, the narrator hedges Polarchos’ ability to narrate accurate stories. But a first-time reader of the Urania has no reason to believe that Polarchos does not know Lusio’s full story. The narrator’s intervention is not given context until almost 100 pages later when Amphilanthus and Polarchos—as well as the reader—learn that Lusio is the character Isabella in disguise (II.369–76). Nonetheless, the narrator insistently demonstrates their narratorial superiority in contrast to Polarchos’ relative ignorance.

Why does the narrator qualify Polarchos’ narratorial skill when the reader lacks the necessary context of Lusio’s full identity? I would suggest that Polarchos’ geopolitical identity partly informs the narrator’s desire to perform their superior knowledge. Polarchos is the illegitimate son of the king of Cyprus, and by the end of Wroth’s romance has become king himself (II.407). In the early modern English imaginary, Cyprus represented a significant loss to Christian imperial rule. Richard Knolles, a historian of the Ottoman Empire, described the 1571 Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (previously under Venetian control) as a failure of international Christian cooperation.² Consequently, Wroth’s narrator questions the narrative authority of a character whose geopolitical identity signifies a failure of Christian expansionism. By narrative authority, I mean a character’s or narrator’s ability to direct the romance’s narrative flow and provide information to the reader without intratextual or metatextual resistance from other characters.³ This questioning of Polarchos’ authority would have been emphasized by the fact that the readers ‘embod[ying]’ the narrator’s voice as they read the romance aloud—Wroth herself, her dedicatee Susan Herbert, the countess of Montgomery, and other members of their coterie—were invested in projects of Protestant Christian expansionism.⁴ The subtle shadow of Ottoman imperial power in Polarchos accompanies the narrator’s need to perform their own authority—that is, their ability to direct and exert power over the narrative—at the expense of Polarchos. Polarchos presents both a formal and geopolitical threat to the narrator, who is ventriloquized by English readers with Christian imperial aspirations.

There is a long tradition of reading the contemporary political allusions within the Urania. In one particularly impactful reading, Josephine Roberts argues that Wroth’s romance contains a ‘countermyth’ to the disappointments of Jacobean foreign policy.⁵ Following Roberts’ observation that Wroth’s characters successfully create an international Christian coalition where James I failed to do so amidst the Bohemian crisis, several critics have examined how Wroth imagines alternatives to Jacobean geopolitical stances.⁶ Subsequent editors of Wroth have noted that Part II’s introduction of obstacles to the increasingly beleaguered Christian empire in the form of ‘pagan giants and infidels’ qualifies Part I’s Christian imperial ‘countermyth’ (II.xxxiii–iv). However, few critics apart from Bernadette Andrea have seriously discussed Ottoman presence in the Urania.⁷ Andrea argues that the Urania’s ‘geopolitical palimpsest’—the romance imposes a fantastical Christian empire onto historically Ottoman regions—functions as a kind of literary imperialism.⁸

By Andrea’s account, Wroth invokes the Ottoman Empire through its absence. In this essay, I move beyond this configuration of presence-through-absence to propose that early seventeenth-century England’s ambiguous relationship to the Ottoman Empire informs the Urania’s narrative style. Gerald MacLean characterizes this ambiguous relationship as ‘imperial envy’: England admired the Ottomans’ imperial might and sociopolitical governance, desiring them as allies and trade partners, but considered them a threat to Christendom and England’s own emergent imperial fantasies.⁹ A logic of imperial envy is at play in the Urania passage with which I began this essay. Even as Wroth’s narrator qualifies Polarchos’ narrative authority in relation to their own, they nonetheless include him as a narratorial collaborator or co-narrator of sorts. They seek both identification with, and differentiation from, a character hailing from an island associated with Ottoman power.

This essay further elucidates the narrative and formal functions of imperial envy in the Urania. I argue that in what I call the Urania’s use and destabilization of linguistic severalty, Wroth registers the paradox of imperial envy: the desire to collaborate and identify with a foreign group, while simultaneously fearing their incursion on one’s land and influence. Severalty signifies the quality of being separate, distinct, and entirely oneself.¹⁰ For example, Arthur Golding observed that the Eucharist removes ‘seueraltie’, distinctness of body and identity, between Christ and those who ingest his body.¹¹ Severalty could also connote the legal condition of something, such as land, being owned and used individually.¹² By linguistic severalty, I refer to how a piece of writing differentiates between discrete characters and their voices through the use of punctuation and other signals like end-stops, subject and object nouns, and narratorial interventions that clarify a speaker’s identity.

Any reader of Wroth knows the difficulty of simply identifying a sentence’s subject among Wroth’s trailing phrases and frequent omissions of subject and object nouns and pronouns. Take, for instance, the conversation between Leonia and Veralinda in Part I. The profusion of clauses and repetitive ‘she’ pronouns in lieu of character names make it difficult to distinguish between the speakers without careful rereading (I.433–6). This style of unstable linguistic severalty is not unique to Wroth. It is characteristic of the syntactically and narratively digressive English prose romances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹³ Following Patricia Parker, critics have long characterized romance by its ‘dilatory’ and ‘errant’ narrative structures.¹⁴ Just as romances wander between various plots, delaying the possibility of narrative closure, the clauses and pronouns of prose romance proliferate in a similar project of syntactical wandering.¹⁵

I propose that in Wroth’s Urania, instances of syntactical and grammatical wandering take on a particularly geopolitical charge in episodes featuring Ottoman-coded characters, by which I mean characters associated with Ottoman peoples, places, or objects. In interactions between the narrator and Ottoman-coded characters, Wroth’s common practice of using syntactical and pronominal ambiguity of voice—that is, her play with her characters’ linguistic severalty—registers the unstable severalty in English configurations of Anglo-Ottoman relations. In the Urania, contemporary slippages between English and Ottoman geographic, political, legal, religious, and racial identities heighten the characteristically unstable severalty of voice within prose romance. I argue that these slippages create a synergy between the phenomenon of imperial envy and the granularities of Wroth’s prose.

In training its readers to navigate overlapping voices and separate characters into discrete subjects, the Urania functions as a formal exercise in negotiating geopolitical relationships made fraught by both contradictory and overlapping ambitions and identity markers. As Urvashi Chakravarty observes, many pre- and early modern critical race scholars read race ‘in terms not of axes of difference but rather of proximate relations’.¹⁶ Rather than assuming that English early moderns categorized all who were not English or Protestant as fundamentally other, this scholarly tradition considers how phenomena like imperial envy, among others, contributed to more porous conceptions of English identity. My essay builds upon this tradition to ask how Wroth’s Urania formally articulates the racial, cultural, and political dynamics of proximate difference at the level of the clause, pronoun, and punctuation mark.

I begin with the state of Anglo-Ottoman relations circa the Urania’s composition, discussing how members of the Sidney-Herbert circle configured the Ottomans as both potential threats and desired allies and objects of identification. In the following sections, I exhibit how these ambiguous dynamics of identification and differentiation synergize with Wroth’s romance style and its (non-)differentiations between Christian European and Ottoman-coded characters. In examining how the granularities of Wroth’s prose formally amplify the unstable severalty of English and Ottoman identity markers like nation, religion, and race, this essay proposes that geopolitically inflected approaches to the Urania can deepen understandings of Wroth’s formal technique. The Urania’s formal elements have been underexamined in comparison to more global narratological analysis.¹⁷ I consequently seek to expand existing methods of reading and writing about Wroth’s Urania by demonstrating the geopolitical interpretive potential within its atomic parts.

WROTH AND THE ANGLO-OTTOMAN WORLD

There is significant documentation of Wroth’s engagement with contemporary geopolitical concerns. Her friends and family described her as a purveyor of international political news for their social circle.¹⁸ Wroth also invested in trading companies, cultivated relationships with said companies’ governors, and was involved in her father Robert Sidney’s governance of the Dutch town of Flushing.¹⁹ However, I am concerned with how Wroth specifically registers the ambiguities of the Anglo-Ottoman relationship. Before turning to the Sidney-Herberts, I will briefly trace the state of that relationship from Elizabeth I’s reign until the Urania’s composition in the late 1610s and 1620s.

The sixteenth-century Catholic Church imposed embargoes upon countries trading with the so-called ‘infidel’ Ottoman Empire.²⁰ Following Elizabeth’s excommunication by the Pope in 1570 and her subsequent correspondence with Sultan Murad III and Safiye, the mother of the sultan’s successor, Anglo-Ottoman trade increased dramatically.²¹ This led to the 1592 creation of the Levant Company. With increased trade came a surge of English interest in the Ottoman world, as well as fears surrounding threats to Christianity and Ottoman incursion into Christian-occupied lands. The Jacobean court in which Wroth took part was pervaded with fantasies of Christian and English victories over the Ottomans. Over 60 plays featuring Islamic places and themes were produced in the 1580s–1620s.²² To celebrate Elizabeth Stuart’s marriage to Elector Frederick, the court staged a performance of an English navy triumphing over a group of Ottoman galleys.²³ Due to Robert Sidney’s place within Elizabeth Stuart’s entourage, Wroth likely attended these entertainments.²⁴

However, the depiction of the Ottomans in nautical entertainments as conquered opponents does not fully illustrate English conceptions of Ottoman imperial might. The Sidney-Herbert circle was committed to forward Protestantism and viewed the Muslim Ottomans as a threat to Protestant European expansion.²⁵ Hubert Languet, in a letter to Philip Sidney—Wroth’s uncle, whom she claims in the Urania’s frontispiece as her ‘renowned’ literary ancestor (I.cxxi)—wrote that infighting between Christian countries would enable the Ottomans to conquer the whole of Europe.²⁶ The Sidney-Herbert circle also recognized the Ottomans as potential allies in their project of curbing Spanish Catholic influence in Europe. In 1593, the Levant Company agent Edward Barton assisted in persuading the Ottomans not to renew their truce with Spain.²⁷ Fulke Greville, a friend of Philip Sidney’s, claimed that through obstructing the Spanish-Ottoman alliance, England had kept ‘this fearful standard of the half-moon waving in such manner over all the King of Spain’s designs as he durst move nowhere against his neighbour Christian Princes for fear of being encompassed within the horns of the heathen crescent’.²⁸ Greville characterized the Ottomans as ‘heathen[s]’, alienated from the true Christian faith. But he simultaneously presented the Ottomans as England’s and Protestant Europe’s allies against Spanish Catholic incursion. Paradoxically, members of the Sidney-Herbert circle identified with the Ottomans against their shared Catholic enemies—Greville went so far as to envision the English assuming the Ottoman crescent symbol as their own—while also fearing Ottoman threats to forward Protestantism.

For many in the Sidney-Herbert circle, piracy became a locus through which to articulate this ambiguously proximate Anglo-Ottoman relationship. From the late sixteenth through seventeenth centuries, many English subjects were enslaved by pirates operating out of the Ottoman polities of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. After working as ‘galley slaves’ (enslaved individuals who laboured on ships), these subjects often became pirates themselves, and many also converted to Islam.²⁹ Galley-slavery was not unique to the Ottoman Empire. England and other European states also engaged in piracy towards, and enslaved, both Ottoman and European subjects.³⁰ However, English writings tended to associate galley-slavery with a particularly Ottoman quality. Take Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Although the play ends with the Venetian court sentencing Mosca to labour in the galleys, Volpone earlier distinguishes between Christian experiences of ‘tedious captiuity’—tiresome, long-lasting enslavement—in ‘the Turkes Galleyes’ with more ‘temperate’ experiences in ‘Christians Galleyes’.³¹ Panicked by Ottoman piracy’s facilitation of Christian conversions to Islam, English writings from plays to travelogues and sermons reinforced an association between galley-slavery and the phenomenon of ‘turning Turk’: a common phrase famously used in Othello, when Othello asks his brawling Venetian soldiers if they have ‘turned Turks’ and lost their ‘Christian shame’.³² Despite galley-slavery’s widespread use, English writings regularly imagined it as a catalyst for the Ottomanization of Europeans.

References to galley-slavery abound in the writing of the Sidney-Herberts. In the revised version of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the hero Pyrocles is briefly enslaved aboard a pirate galley.³³ In 1596, while governor of Flushing, Robert Sidney wrote to Burghley and the Privy Council to help free Flushing citizens under English governance who had been enslaved on Ottoman galleys.³⁴ Around the same time, he composed a sonnet in which the speaker compares themself, in submission to their beloved, to a galley-slave: ‘But as the slaue […] whoe on the oare doth stretch / his lims all day, all night his wownds doth binde / Cheynd to those beauties, whence I cannot fly’.³⁵ Sidney’s speaker, ‘[c]heynd’ to the ship and their beloved, cannot escape the confines of their devoted enslavement. They ‘stretch’ their limbs in a parody of moving freely, and in doing so support that which enslaves them. This sonnet and others in Sidney’s sequence, with their discussions of enslavement and ‘unrewarded worth’, likely refer to Sidney’s alienation from court during his longest stay in Flushing.³⁶

Another Sidney-Herbert employed a similar motif of galley-slavery for similar purposes: William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, Wroth’s cousin with whom she had a longstanding relationship and two children.³⁷ In 1601, Mary Fitton, whom Pembroke had refused to marry, gave birth to Pembroke’s stillborn child. Pembroke was fined and banished from court.³⁸ Writing to Robert Cecil, Pembroke compared his alienation from Elizabeth to having a fortune ‘as slavish as any man’s that lives fettered in a galley’.³⁹ Like his uncle Robert, Pembroke used what would likely have registered as an Ottoman-coded form of enslavement—that is, from the English point of view—to configure his state of disappointed devotion. Within these texts, the queen metaphorically enslaves Sidney and Pembroke by denying them opportunities for political advancement at court. Rather than crave escape from their queen and enslaver, they instead seek her favour. Sidney and Pembroke occupied two positions within the discursive formations of Mediterranean piracy: both the enslaved Christian rower and that same rower with the potential to ‘turn Turk’ and identify with their enslaver and object of desire.

Within the Sidney-Herbert circle, piracy also incited legal debates on inter-imperial relations. In September 1621—two months after Part I of the Urania was entered in the Stationers’ Register, and around the time Wroth had begun composing Part II (I.xvii; II.xx–xxiii)—Sir Thomas Roe travelled to Constantinople as its newest English ambassador.⁴⁰ Roe had a pre-existing connection to the Sidney-Herberts. He and his wife were Wroth’s landlords in Woodford, and Wroth sat behind the Roes in church. Roe also corresponded with Pembroke during his embassy to the Mughal court, was appointed to a captaincy in the Netherlands by Robert Sidney, and frequently transported books and letters between Sidney and his lieutenant governor in Flushing, as well as his secretary.⁴¹ In Roe’s credential letter, James I requested Sultan Osman II to place Roe under his protection so as to protect the Anglo-Ottoman relationship. James identified pirates as an imminent threat to said relationship.⁴² In a separate letter, James urged Roe to convince Osman to condemn his Algerian and Tunisian subjects engaging in piracy as his and England’s ‘common enimies’.⁴³ Writing to Pembroke the following spring, Roe reported that Osman had instead nurtured the Algerian and Tunisian pirates’ expectations to become ‘the Guardes of the Turkes Gallyes’.⁴⁴ Moreover, Roe feared that the pirates, sponsored by Osman and his advisors, would invade ‘euen our coastes & shoares’.⁴⁵ To Roe, Osman’s potential legitimization of the North African pirates would not only erode Anglo-Ottoman commerce. It could threaten the very bounds of England’s dominions.

Another acquaintance of the Sidney-Herberts took a more ambivalent approach to the prospect of Ottoman threats to English commerce and sovereignty. Alberico Gentili was an early theorist of international law who enjoyed the Sidney-Herberts’ patronage.⁴⁶ The Sidneys kept several of his books in the library at Penshurst Place, where Wroth spent much of her childhood.⁴⁷ Gentili’s posthumous Hispanica advocatio (1613) printed a series of cases in which Gentili had argued whether Algiers and Tunis, as polities under Ottoman dominion, could rightfully sponsor acts of piracy. In one case involving transactions between English merchants and North African pirates and government officials, Gentili argued that these transactions were legitimate exchanges of goods.⁴⁸ He thus legitimized North African civic voices, identities, and actions on the inter-imperial stage, as well as English engagement with them. In other cases, Gentili contradictorily claimed that North Africans, as subordinate Ottoman subjects, could not represent sovereign nations nor legitimately engage in inter-imperial transactions.⁴⁹

Gentili left uncertain the question of whether North African officials and the pirates they sponsored held political severalty: that is, whether they could operate as discrete political entities independent of the Ottoman sphere of control. These pirates could include once-English subjects like John Ward: a famous convert to piracy and Islam who frequently operated out of Tunis.⁵⁰ In arguing both sides, Gentili allowed for the pirate—a figure of ambiguous race, religion, nation (gens)—to occupy multiple geopolitical identities. The pirate could be Ottoman, English, Tunisian, or without a clear gens. They could both uphold and undermine English mercantile interests and the political legitimacy of English inter-imperial transactions. This figure consequently signified larger English concerns regarding pressure points in the severalty of English, Ottoman, and intra-Ottoman political, legal, religious, and racial identities.

In navigating these instances of unstable severalty, diverse members of the Sidney-Herbert circle configured the Ottomans as both allies in and threats to their fantasies of English Christian expansion and authority on the inter-imperial stage. For the remainder of this essay, I exhibit Wroth’s use of pronominal and syntactical ambiguity in episodes featuring Ottoman-coded characters. In doing so, I demonstrate how in these Urania episodes, contemporary ambivalences in distinctions between English and Ottoman identities synergize with the characteristic formal ambiguities of romance to create a geopolitically inflected narrative style.

‘USE ALL CHRISTIAN SHIPS WITH KINDNES’

Early in Part II, the character Antissia is sailing to Romania with her husband when the pirate Dolimandro boards their ship (II.54). Before Dolimandro can demand anything of them, another pirate arrives and overpowers them all: Limorando, a non-Christian giant who serves the usurping Sophy of Persia, one of Part II’s central antagonists (II.54). Limorando attempts to assault Antissia, whom he views as ‘infidell’, but is thwarted by Dolimandro:

When [Limorando] found even terror shooke [Antissia] if hee touched soe little as her hand, she sounded: ‘Oh change of dispositions, late frantick, fearles; now trembling, reddy to dy with feare; beefor dreadles, now knowing, gasping for quiett breathe. Alas, Antissia, how miserable are all woemen in this kinde, butt thy self above all least to bee pitied, butt as a woeman, whos weakenesses are ther best plea’. Wee must all tender her, and soe did this brave piratt, called Dolimandro, an Italian borne in the country of Tuscani […] [Limorando] tooke [Antissia] in his armes to kis her, butt she striving with him, refusing such disloyalty (his armes fitter to handle beasts then Queens), crusht her soe as she fell senceles to the earthe. Limorando thinking her dead, in tears beewailing her and blaming his rude handling her gentlenes, butt Dolimandro, who had with his intention also prepared what showld bee nessessary […] with his owne hands seased Limorando. And with a Turkish knife, which hee had all that while concealed about him, determining to kill ore kill him self if brought to Vasalage, his spiritt contemning that, strake him to the hart soe as his last groanes came, fitt to make full expression of his highest griefe for hurting Antissia […] Dolimandro as soone as hee strucke Limorando, att that instant seased on his Simiter and with that made him self quickly lord of all. (II.55–6)

After defeating Limorando, Dolimandro reveals his true identity: he was once squire to Amphilanthus, Antissia’s old lover and now Holy Roman Emperor (II.56). He then describes how he became a pirate:

‘I soone and, alas, too soone for my misfortunes, left my master; after that, taking to the Albanian warr, ther was taken prisoner, after made a gally slave, thence came in time to rule a gally, and soe came to bee master my self, and then liking fighting, and especially bouties, I came to this greatnes, to bee the chiefe Piratt of thes parts, and keept all in awe till thes stragling Giants of Percia came into thes quarters, on whom I now Vowe onely Vengance’. […] [Dolimandro] doubted nott butt to have commision to goe on in his resolved course against the Giants, which commaund hee likewise left with his followers and ships, yett with strict commaunde to use all Christian ships with kindnes and Christian Knights and Princes with respect. (II.57)

This episode captures a complex interplay of geopolitical allegiances, racial and religious identities, and narrative voices. Those of Dolimandro would have been readily accessible to the Urania’s English readers. Dolimandro begins in a privileged place within Amphilanthus’ Christian empire. He later becomes a ‘gally slave’, and then a pirate unconnected to any state or sovereign. He ends as a privateer—a pirate with governmental commission—who protects Christian maritime interests.⁵¹ Dolimandro’s story resembles the captivity and conversion narratives discussed above. Captured and enslaved by (Ottoman) pirates, he then becomes one of them.

Wroth’s use of the adjective ‘Turkish’ also intimates Dolimandro’s association with the Ottoman Empire. In early modern English discourse, ‘Turk’ was a racializing term that could signify any person of Muslim faith as well as any Ottoman subject, while ‘Turkey’ signified both Asia Minor and the larger Ottoman Empire (though the Ottomans did not use the term to denote their territories).⁵² Collapsing the ethnic, geographic, political, and religious diversity of the Ottoman Empire, the English configuration of the ‘Turk’ became what Matthew Dimmock has called a reflection of England’s relationship ‘both with a fragile, yet symbolically powerful “Christendome”, and with the Ottomans’ rather than ‘a single defining notion of “otherness”’.⁵³ Consequently, Dolimandro’s possession of a ‘Turkish knife’ and his easy handling of Limorando’s scimitar—a weapon associated with Ottoman soldiers—is not a neutral talent for weaponry.⁵⁴ It signals Dolimandro’s Ottoman coding, despite his being an Italian Christian. Paradoxically, Dolimandro’s possession and mastery of Ottoman weaponry enables his defeat of Limorando—who is himself an Ottoman-coded figure, carrying a scimitar and engaging in piracy against infidel Christians—and his subsequent commitment to the defence of Christendom.⁵⁵

Wroth emphasizes the slippage in identity between Dolimandro and Limorando through their near-anagrammatic names and her use of pronominal and syntactical ambiguity. From the moment of Dolimandro taking up his ‘Turkish knife’ to Limorando’s death, Wroth’s narrator does not use proper names to differentiate between these characters. Dolimandro and Limorando’s temporary pronominal indistinguishability allows for a brief but crucial misreading. Once Dolimandro takes up his ‘Turkish knife’, the narrator declares that he had concealed it because he would rather die by suicide than be taken prisoner: ‘determining to kill ore kill him self if brought to Vasalage, his spiritt contemning that, strake him to the hart soe as his last groanes came, fitt to make full expression of his highest griefe for hurting Antissia’ (II.55–6). Without any syntactical signal, the sentence’s subject shifts from Dolimandro to Limorando. The shift is not evident until the final clause, when the narrator clarifies that the current subject’s groans express his ‘griefe for hurting Antissia’. The clarification reveals that Limorando is now the subject: a few lines earlier, the giant ‘crusht’ Antissia in his arms, believing her dead (II.55). However, until this final clause, one can easily misread the subject as Dolimandro, striking himself in the heart with his Turkish knife to escape his present ‘bondage’ by the giant (II.54). At the same time that Dolimandro and Limorando’s geopolitical, religious, and racial identities bleed into each other, Wroth’s narrator facilitates a formal slippage between the episode’s antagonist and purported Christian hero. The difficulty of navigating the unstable severalty of English and Ottoman identity markers heightens the interpretive difficulty already present within the narrative style of English prose romances.

The formal and geopolitical slippage of identity between Dolimandro and Limorando accompanies that between two other characters in this episode: Antissia and the narrator themself. Antissia, like Dolimandro, has a geopolitically indeterminate identity. Antissia is a princess of Romania and lives in the court at Constantinople: the Ottomans’ long-time imperial stronghold (I.55).⁵⁶ The early modern English understanding of ‘Romania’, much like ‘Turkey’, was geopolitically imprecise. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century atlases and travel writings used ‘Romania’ to refer to Asia Minor as well as the region previously known as ‘Thrace’, which encompassed parts of modern-day Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey.⁵⁷ In the Urania, Antissia’s Romania is imaginatively Christian, but the region was under Ottoman control at the time of Wroth’s composition. Much like that of Dolimandro, Antissia’s geopolitical identity is as difficult to delineate as the formal contours of her pronouns and speech. While Dolimandro is identified with Limorando, Antissia’s formal self bleeds into that of Wroth’s narrator: an ambiguously gendered figure whose geopolitical identity, while never discussed within the diegesis, is tied to the English reading voices of Wroth, Susan Herbert, and their coterie.

Before Limorando ‘crush[es]’ Antissia, she laments her situation and the narrator calls for the reader to pity her:

‘Oh change of dispositions, late frantick, fearles; now trembling, reddy to dy with feare; beefor dreadles, now knowing, gasping for quiett breathe. Alas, Antissia, how miserable are all woemen in this kinde, butt thy self above all least to bee pitied, butt as a woeman, whos weakenesses are ther best plea’. Wee must all tender her, and soe did this brave piratt, called Dolimandro. (II.55)

The punctuation in this passage—and, consequently, the delineation between Antissia’s and the narrator’s speech—is almost entirely editorial. Wroth’s autograph manuscript does not clearly separate the narration from Antissia’s dialogue. While it does seem likely that ‘[a]las Antissia […] least to bee pited’ is Antissia’s dialogue—Wroth’s characters frequently adopt reflexive speech—the narrative voice could then switch to the narrator: ‘butt as a woeman, whos weakenesses are ther best plea, wee must all tender her’.⁵⁸ With this switch, the narrator justifies their encouragement of readerly sympathy for Antissia through Antissia’s femininity.

However, the editorial punctuation also provides a plausible reading. If Antissia speaks the ‘butt as a woeman’ line, she argues that, while she may not deserve more pity than any other woman, she nonetheless deserves sympathy due to the ‘miser[y]’ she experiences as one. Antissia and the narrator do not operate as entirely discrete speaking agents. Rather, Wroth’s ambiguous punctuation allows for multiple potential speaking agents within the same line. Antissia and the narrator, via their overlapping voices, become narratorial collaborators with a shared goal of catalysing sympathy for Antissia.

The unstable severalty of Antissia’s and the narrator’s voices also allows Antissia to usurp the narrator’s narrative authority. After Dolimandro has revealed his identity, he describes meeting Antissia for the first time. The narrator claims that Antissia cannot remember this meeting’s particulars, but Antissia contradicts them:

Antissia called him to minde and blushing tolde him that certainly she thought she had beefor seene him, butt cowld nott call to minde wher, ore—‘Butt I remember the last kinde token I had from him [Amphilanthus]; you brought itt me’. (II.56–7)

The editorial em-dash signals the shift from the narrator’s voice to Antissia’s. Indeed, Antissia cuts off the narrator. This is an extremely rare example of a character interrupting and explicitly contradicting Wroth’s narrator. Indeed, I oversimplify by calling it an interruption. In Wroth’s autograph manuscript, Antissia’s voice overtakes that of the narrator without any signal from punctuation:

w^t that Antissia called him to minde, and blushing tolde him that certainly she thought she had beefor seene him, butt cowld nott call to minde, wher, ore butt I remember the last kinde token I had from him, you brought itt mee.⁵⁹

The mid-sentence shift from third-person to first-person speech occurs without any punctuation or narratorial signal such as ‘said she’. The lack of signalling multiplies the passage’s potential readings. It is grammatically plausible that the narrator is recalling ‘the last kinde token’ they, not Antissia, had from Amphilanthus. While it later becomes clear that the narrative voice has switched to Antissia, Antissia does more than interrupt and contradict the narrator. Her voice comingles with the narrator’s before surpassing their authority to redirect her conversation with Dolimandro. Mirroring Dolimandro, Antissia’s geopolitical ambiguity, her simultaneous English-ness and Ottoman-ness, accompanies a similar slippage in the formal contours of her voice.

ANTISSIA’S INFECTIOUS VOICE

Throughout the Urania, Antissia is described as ‘unruly’ and ungovernable (I.320). In an episode of her ‘madness’, several characters mock her excessive and poor artistic output (I.320, II.33–53). In response to this characterization, critics tend to follow Mary Ellen Lamb’s claim that Antissia functions as a ‘container’ for cultural anxieties over female voices.⁶⁰ I instead propose that Antissia’s excessive voice formally threatens the narrator’s authority over the Urania. I previously demonstrated that Antissia’s voice can overlap with and even overtake that of the narrator. Elsewhere, the romance registers this capacity of Antissia’s as a distinctly political threat: a kind of linguistic conquest that emulates foreign incursion.

The narrator often presents Antissia as a poor speaker. Early in Part I, Antissia composes a 12-line poem that the narrator describes as ‘a Song, or rather part of one’ (I.147). The narrator is assumedly critiquing Antissia for composing an incomplete sonnet that ought to be 14 lines. They acerbically remark: ‘[a]ssuredly more there was of this Song, or else she had with her unframd and unfashioned thoughts, as unfashionably framed these lines’ (I.147). It is not enough to belittle Antissia’s poetic ability: they must also prove themself a superior writer. Using a chiastic sentence structure—‘unframd and unfashioned […] unfashionably framed’—they contrast their rhetorical skill with Antissia’s relative incompetence.

The narrator also presents Antissia as an incompetent narrator. Late in Part II, the Queen of Bulgaria asks Antissia to relate her recent adventures. Antissia narrates her story from the beginning of Part II, describing her descent into madness and the sorceress Melissea’s cure. She ends with how she and Dolorindus were captured by Tomardo and rescued by Selarinus (II.250–52). Antissia entirely omits her encounter with Dolimandro and Limorando. The Queen’s mocking response to what the narrator terms Antissia’s ‘strange narration’—indeed, her explicitly incomplete narration—carries a tinge of the narrator’s scorn towards Antissia’s insufficient narratorial capacities (II.253).

Even as the narrator delegitimizes Antissia’s narratorial voice, they acknowledge overlaps between Antissia’s narratorial capacities and their own. Following the logic of imperial envy, they identify themself with Antissia while also striving to be interpreted as a superior narrator. In one much-cited episode, Antissia tells Pamphilia and Amphilanthus a story about a woman from ‘Great Brittany’ who tells Antissia a story about questioning her lover’s devotion (I.321–4). Antissia slips from third- to first-person pronouns, revealing herself to be the supposedly fictional ‘Brittaine Lady’ (I.324). Her companions respond with mocking amusement, to which Antissia responds:

‘Pray God’, said shee, ‘I doe not play the Brittaine Lady now’. They both then did intreat to heare the rest. ‘That soone you may’, said shee, ‘for this was all, only in a finer manner’, and with greater passion shee did then conclude. (I.324)

Roberts observes that ‘and with greater passion shee did then conclude’ could feasibly be voiced by the narrator or Antissia (I.755). The 1621 print edition, with its lack of quotation marks, does not clearly signal a switch in voice.⁶¹ Roberts inserts quotation marks to present the phrase as the narrator’s commentary on Antissia’s behaviour: flustered by her pronoun slip, Antissia rushes to finish her story. However, multiple potential readings suggest that Antissia could instead be performing the same narrative function as the narrator within the same phrase. That is, ‘and with greater passion shee did then conclude’ could signify either Antissia or the narrator transitioning from ventriloquizing a person in their story (Antissia ventriloquizes the Brittaine Lady; the narrator ventriloquizes Antissia) to describing how that person finished their own embedded story. Suggestively, Antissia’s and the narrator’s voices and narratorial functions comingle as Antissia pronominally identifies herself with an English character: ‘British’ had not yet emerged as a national signifier. Further mystification of Antissia’s ambiguous geopolitical identity—Romanian, Ottoman, English—coincides with her voice’s increasingly unstable severalty.

Later in Part I, both Antissia and the narrator present Antissia’s ability to overtake the narrator’s voice as a kind of foreign infiltration. Once Amphilanthus has forsaken Antissia, she urges both Dolorindus and her nephew Antissius to kill Amphilanthus (I.357). Her plan fails, and Antissia laments her betrayal of Romania by putting its leader, Antissius, in danger. She likens herself to an invasive ‘weed’ that ought to be destroyed lest it ‘infect the earth’ (I.361). As an agent of geographic conquest, she threatens both Antissius’ rule and Amphilanthus’ Christian empire. Antissia’s self-description resonates with Knolles’ description of the Ottoman janissaries: an elite branch of the Ottoman army made up of Christian children from Ottoman-controlled European regions (‘Rumili’ or ‘Romania’). The janissaries go to Asia Minor, ‘where learning the Turkish language and law, they are also infected with the vices and maners of them with whom they liue, and so in short time become right Mahometanes’.⁶² Just as such Christian European children become ‘infected’ with Ottoman identity markers and promote Ottoman imperial expansion, so too does the Romanian/Rumi Antissia threaten to infect and thereby undermine the Urania’s Christian empire.

Rather than divest Antissia of her infectious, Ottomanizing abilities, the narrator adopts Antissia’s own metaphor. They become infected by Antissia’s voice. After Antissia has resolved to abandon her anger towards Amphilanthus, Lucenia encourages her to cultivate it. Immediately following is a speech that could be assigned to either Antissia or the narrator. The speaker declares, ‘Amphilanthus I pittie thee’, then discusses Amphilanthus’ inconstancy in love, and finally urges Amphilanthus to ‘love her firmely who onely loveth thee’: presumably Pamphilia (I.362). While the speaker seems more likely to be the narrator—the speaker speaks measuredly regarding Amphilanthus’ inconstancy towards Antissia, which is not characteristic of Antissia—Antissia could nonetheless be interpreted as the speaker. Moreover, when Amphilanthus abandons Pamphilia for Musalina late in Part I, Antissia claims that she ‘fort[old]’ his betrayal (I.496). She thus suggests that she, not the narrator, voiced the speech on Amphilanthus’ inconstancy.

Following the ambiguously voiced ‘Amphilanthus I pittie thee’ speech, the narrator reasserts their voice with the use of third-person narration:

[Antissia] remain’d like a Nettle, hardly scaping the weeders hand, but growing on, turnes to seede, and from thence springs hundreds as stinging: so did she, (scaping out of good Natures corrections) overgrowe by envious absence, to the seeding plenty of all mischiefes growth. (I.362)

The narrator adopts Antissia’s earlier metaphor of herself as an invasive weed. Indeed, Antissia’s language infects the narrator’s own descriptive sensibilities. Antissia’s metaphors of excess and overrunning the earth, invoking Languet’s and Roe’s fears of Ottoman incursion, overtake the narrator’s language just as yet another ambiguously voiced speech destabilizes their voices’ severalties.

The narrator’s original contribution of the imagery of ‘seede[s]’ also amplifies Antissia’s self-description as an infectious, conquering weed. Sixteenth-century physicians like Fracastoro and Paracelsus broke from Galenic understandings of humoral imbalance to propose that disease was caused by exterior—that is, foreign—agents of infection called semina, or seeds.⁶³ These models of foreign contagion provided a language for Tudor and Stuart anxieties surrounding England’s vulnerability to political as well as organic ‘infiltration’.⁶⁴ Following Antissia’s descriptive cues, the narrator magnifies Antissia’s self-identification as a foreign agent of both geographic and linguistic conquest.

In Antissia’s interactions with the narrator, the political problem of Ottoman geographic incursion transmutes into linguistic incursion: a kind of pronominal and vocal overtaking. As I discussed earlier, such pronominal ambiguities and linguistic incursions are not unique to episodes with Ottoman-coded characters. Nonetheless, the narrator’s negotiation of their identification with and derision for Antissia, when coupled with Antissia’s geopolitical indeterminacy, takes on the valences of imperial envy and unstable Anglo-Ottoman severalty.

Just as the Ottomans presented a potential threat to English geographic severalty, in the imaginative space of the Urania, they trouble the linguistic severalty of English voices like that of the narrator (and Wroth herself). However, the narrative styles of romance are more easily transformed than, for instance, diplomatic obstacles at Constantinople. While Wroth’s characteristic narrative style synergizes with geopolitical concerns, she can also revise that style to imagine an Anglo-Ottoman paradigm other than imperial envy. I will end this essay by returning to Wroth’s presentation of the character Polarchos. Polarchos’ interactions with the narrator do not formally challenge the narrator’s severalty, but instead, enable them to articulate their discrete voice. Through Polarchos, Wroth imagines an alternative to unstable Anglo-Ottoman severalty that emphasizes the authority of the narrator’s voice—a voice embodied by Wroth and her forward-Protestant circle.

‘AS POLARCHOS HATH TOLD YOU’

In a famous Urania episode, several characters encounter the ‘barbarous’, ‘unchristened’ island of Cyprus (I.46–7). After undoing an enchantment on Cyprus, they inspire the entire island’s population to become Christians (I.170).⁶⁵ As Andrea notes, by including Cyprus in her romance’s Christian imperial fantasies, Wroth elides the fact of the island’s being an Ottoman stronghold since 1571.⁶⁶ By Andrea’s reading, Wroth uses Cyprus to articulate a disconnect between her romance’s illusion of Christian supremacy and the historical reality of Ottoman power. Cyprus is a fantasy of Ottoman conversion: a reversal of the ‘turning Turk’ phenomenon and a significant success in the formation of Amphilanthus’ Christian empire.

It follows, then, that Polarchos, the Urania’s most prominent Cypriot character, actively promotes the project of Christian expansion. After his conversion to Christianity, Polarchos joins Amphilanthus’ inner circle. He travels with Amphilanthus as the chamberlain of his empire and carries the Holy Roman Empire’s standard into battle (I.489, 583–4, 658; II.300). The Ottoman-coded, now Christianized Polarchos supports the protagonists’ Christian imperialism. Moreover, Polarchos’ support signifies a temporal regression towards a time in which Cyprus was under Christian imperial rule. Once part of the Byzantine Empire, Cyprus was conquered by King Richard I in 1191 before being ceded to Guy of Lusignan.⁶⁷ The Lusignan dynasty ruled Cyprus until it passed into Venetian control through Caterina Cornaro, wife of the last king’s illegitimate son.⁶⁸ As Cyprus’ eventual king, Polarchos—who is also the illegitimate son of the Cypriot king—signifies a temporal regression towards Christian imperial rule, following a tradition in romance of looking backwards in time.⁶⁹

The Urania’s depiction of Cyprus does not simply withdraw from the seventeenth-century present. It evokes a specifically pre-Ottoman Cyprus resembling that described in contemporary English travel writings. Anthony Sherley wrote that, following the Ottoman conquest of Venetian Cyprus, ‘the barbarousnesse of the Turke, and time […] defaced all the [island’s] Monuments of Antiquity’.⁷⁰ Meanwhile, Polarchos’ Cyprus, while still occupied by people whom the narrator deems ‘barbarous’, contains the Throne of Love: a monument, dedicated to the classical goddess Venus, that features statues of Venus and Cupid (I.47–8). Polarchos’ Cyprus has temporally regressed in the direction of Christian imperial rule, even as Wroth’s description of the ‘unchristened’ Cypriots subtly acknowledges contemporary Ottoman power over Cyprus.

This Cypriot temporal-imperial regression formally registers in Wroth’s introduction of Polarchos during the tournament on Cyprus:

Two dayes he [Ollorandus] thus kept the field, without shew of loosing the honor to any: but then came one, who encountred him with such cleane strength and valour, as he was forc’d to confesse, hee matched him; nor did it turne to any dishonour to him, when it was knowne who it was, being Polarchos, Bastard sonne to the king of that Iland; but soone did Amphilanthus revenge his friend [Ollorandus], and so by conquest kept the field, though he confest, hee had seldom felt such an encounter […] Thus he redeemd his friends mischance, maintaining the field against all commers, in the defence of his mistrisses beauty. Two dayes hee held it, in which time hee wonne the fame of the bravest Knight. (I.164, emphases mine)

Polarchos’ entrance into the Urania incites a narrative arrest and regression. The narrator doubles back on their previous statements to end the episode where they began it. They state that Ollorandus ‘kept the field’ for two days and confessed that Polarchos matched his skill, and then reiterate these events in the opposite order with Amphilanthus taking Ollorandus’ place. Much like the Urania’s Cyprus, Polarchos catalyses a temporally regressive effect on the tournament episode’s narrative structure. Moreover, as the narrative moves backwards, the narrator switches from passive to active voice while restating the response of Polarchos’ opponents to Polarchos’ martial talent: ‘he was forc’d to confesse, hee matched him […] he confest, hee had seldom felt such an encounter’ (I.164). Mirroring Polarchos’ support of Amphilanthus’ projects of conquest, Polarchos’ formal introduction and sheer martial strength create a narrative space in which the narrator can articulate Amphilanthus’ inhabiting of an active subjecthood (in contrast with Ollorandus). Polarchos is a potential adversary turned political supporter.

Moments in which Polarchos takes on a narratorial role also provide opportunities for the narrator to articulate their own overt voice and narrative authority. I began this essay with the narrator qualifying Polarchos’ narration of Lusio’s story: ‘Polarchos had newly told the whole story (as much, I meane, as hee knew of itt)’ (II.296). Here, the narrator takes pains to differentiate their voice and narrative knowledge from those of Polarchos, despite acknowledging his narratorial contributions. In this act of narratorial self-definition, they break from the narratorial style of Philip Sidney’s revised Arcadia. The revised Arcadia lacks most of the addresses to female readers in its earlier versions, and consequently, many instances of the narrator’s self-acknowledgement as narrator.⁷¹

As Wroth’s narrator explicitly acknowledges Polarchos as a narratorial collaborator, they affirm his, as well as their own, linguistic severalty. Polarchos signifies a sharp departure from Antissia’s narratorial incursions. Late in Part I, Polarchos tells Pamphilia that ‘a young fellow like a Forrester’ told him of Amphilanthus’ capture by Musalina (I.583). Reporting the forester’s direct speech, Polarchos reveals that Amphilanthus’ fellow princes ‘are scattred and lost’ (I.583). While Pamphilia and Polarchos mourn Amphilanthus, the narrator moves to discuss ‘the other eleven Princes that came with Amphilanthus […] and were as Polarchos hath told you scatterd’ (I.584). The narrator describes Polarchos directly addressing the reader—‘you’—and speaking as a discrete voice. However, this is not entirely the case: Polarchos is ventriloquizing the forester’s direct speech. The statement that the princes ‘are scattred and lost’ is consequently voiced by both the forester and Polarchos. But the narrator effaces this unstable vocal severalty to present Polarchos as their co-narrator. Polarchos’ narratorial contributions provide a space in which the narrator can demonstrate their narrative authority by deliberately eliding the episode’s complexities of voice. His shadow of Ottoman presence, rather than threatening the English narrator’s authority, instead upholds it.

WROTH’S GLOBAL FUTURES

The Urania’s Mediterranean Christian coalition may indeed function as a fantastical alternative to the Ottoman Empire. But the granularities of Wroth’s diction and syntax reveal her grounded attention to contemporary pressure points in Anglo-Ottoman relations. In Antissia and Polarchos, Wroth formally articulates the seemingly contradictory Anglo-Ottoman relations of proximity, difference, and imperial envy. While Antissia signifies a competitive relationship defined by simultaneous derision and syntactical identification, Polarchos denotes a beneficial alliance through his furthering of Wroth’s narrator’s authority. When Dolimandro and Limorando’s racial-religious-national identities merge even as Dolimandro kills Limorando to uphold Christian imperialism, or when Wroth’s narrator refers to Antissia as a foreign infection while their voice merges with hers, Wroth’s characteristic use of unstable severalty intertwines with emergent English fantasies of empire.

My essay has only focused on a few moments in the Urania. However, applying a close focus to other characters and episodes could change readings of the larger romance’s pan-European, Middle Eastern, and Asian Christian fantasies. Take one example: when Pamphilia receives a threatening letter from the Sophy of Persia in which he demands her hand in marriage, she declares his threats are ‘fitter for Turcks to deale with then tender Christian Ladys’ (II.258). In suggesting that ‘Turcks’ can better respond to Persian aggression than Christians, Pamphilia invokes the historical Ottomans’ contemporary war with Persia and presents them as potential allies against the Sophy. But Pamphilia, a ‘Christian Lady’, does indeed ‘deale with’ the Sophy’s threats. Immediately following her declaration, she states that she ‘soone answerd his [the Sophy’s] letter’ and then describes her efforts to build an Asian-European alliance and overthrow the Sophy (II.258–9).

Is there something ‘Turkish’ about Pamphilia’s imperial ambitions and her use of textual production towards that end? Moreover, Pamphilia has long been understood as a textual shadow for Wroth herself. Might Wroth be suggesting a parallel between Pamphilia’s literary-political ambitions towards the Islamic world and her own? It is beyond the scope of my essay to answer this question.⁷² Nonetheless, the Urania’s insistent interest in the imperial resonances of literary composition beyond its more explicitly Ottoman-coded characters can continue to aid critics in teasing out the synergy between Wroth’s formal and geopolitical projects.

Footnotes